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Waterstones is about to bet big on Kindle and undertake a huge shift in its business, announcing plans to sell both the Kindle hardware and Amazon’s e-books across its chain of UK shops.
The idea is to keep the physical bookshop alive as a destination for browsing and poking around the shelving while looking for something of interest on a rainy Sunday afternoon, with Waterstones then able to sell you a Kindle and a digital version of the book right there and then should you prefer to leave the paper one behind and embrace the future.
James Daunt, the current exec director of Waterstones, claims he wants to find “The very best way” of letting Waterstones customers buy and consume their books digitally, with the launch ready for this Autumn, once the chain has managed to install Wi-Fi networks across all of its branches. [Waterstones]
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This may well become the way of the future for all Items. You browse them in a shop (who have a limited quantity for display only) then you buy them over the internet in store from that company. So many retailers must be really pissed of with people coming in and looking at their stuff and asking the sales staff any questions they have before walking out to buy online (from a competitor). If you can give people the online discount (or most of it, since you will still have these demo shops to run) while allowing them to be able to see the object IRL, you might have a winning formula.
Have you seen Seoul Tesco? http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/16/view/15557/tesco-virtual-supermarket-in-a-subway-station.html
No I hadn’t, that’s brilliant. Not sure it would work on the London underground though.
Yes, I’m looking forward to the day when I can browse a clothes store and then download digital versions of my clothes instead, before popping into a cafe, browsing their selection of sandwiches and then opting to download a digital version of my chosen sandwich.
Not sure if this was meant to be a response to my comment or not. Anyway there is no reason now why you can’t buy clothes online after trying them out in the shops now.
I can’t help but think this is a long, slow path to the demise of Waterstones. I know they had to do something because their current business model isn’t working, but unless they are getting a good chunk of money from Amazon for each one sold, I can’t see this benefitting them in the mid-long term.
Even if their physical book sales are struggling, they already offer ebooks online and could easily have tied up with one of the main ereader makers like WHSmiths have with Kobo. But opting for Kindles and Amazon ebooks when Waterstones’ own brand of ebooks don’t actually work on them doesn’t makes no sense, unless this if the first step in a more formal partnership with Amazon in the future.
Thing is, i wont go there, because they sell books at the RRP. Whereas i will go into a book shop where i can buy at a discount. Once you take postage into account, almost every book form amazon makes the £3 barrier anyway. So im happy to make that up a little to get the copy, in my hand straight away. For such a large company, with massive buying power, they sure are dumb.
Personally, i like physical books. But are we going the way of the HMV MP3 download point here? Why go to the shop, when you can buy it online?